Of those who make and drink coffee in the comfort of their own home, there are three major subsets:

Those who just need their caffeine fix and are not all that picky about it.

Those who don't mind the combination of time, energy, and money required to make a quality cuppa.

Those who want a happy medium of cost and benefit, wanting but not requiring a nice taste and the benefits of caffeine.

For the first group, a standard drip coffee maker has probably been the default, and now is being superseded by various single cup, more-waste-is-okay-because-it-is-convenient “pod-based” coffee makers.

The second group are those who have the counter-space to dedicate to an espresso machine, the money to buy a fancy one-touch automatic espresso maker, or enjoy the tedium of manually pouring their pour-over.

I used to think that the third group, which I fall in to, was adequately serviced by the French press, but now I think otherwise.

As someone in that third category, I don't drink coffee that often. I don't “need” coffee — or, more specifically, caffeine — to wake me up in the morning, and when I had a commute longer than 20 steps, I didn't stop at Timmies for a cup of their slootwater* every morning. Because of this, I don't feel that it's worth taking up valuable counter space with a plug-in coffee maker. This also means that, when I do have a cup of coffee, it's nice to drink something a little fancier.

While I agree with her sentiment, just saying that I agree with a one-sentence & gif rant doesn’t share my full thoughts, so here they are.

From a secular perspective, it is at least polite for the writers of a piece of music to receive compensation for the use of the song, assuming they want it. Even if it’s just to encourage more music to be composed, the writers should be fairly rewarded for their work in some way. After all, we wouldn’t want a talented songwriter to not have the time to sit at their piano because they are busy doing other things to put bread on the table.

There's nothing wrong with an artist saying, “You have to pay me to use my song at your event”, though usually they don’t say it directly and use the help of a licensing body like Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI). Most parishes and venues that I’ve been to have some form of blanket license that they pay an annual fee for, allowing them to use the songs they want without having to get explicit permission for each one.

This is a decent solution, balancing the work to get permission with what is probably a lesser amount of funding going to the artists than if they were to license tracks individually. Obviously, it doesn’t prevent a “bad actor” like an overcontrolling record label from taking a larger cut than they should and paying the artist in literal peanuts, but that’s another complicated problem for a different article.

Assuming that a person performing a musical work is doing so within the permissions given by the licensing body, both the necessity of politeness and a Christian’s moral obligations could be deemed fulfilled. But there is another angle.

At the beginning of last year, I set myself a relatively arbitrary goal of how much I wanted to read. I then created some artificial constraints as to how I spent my free time, in order to encourage making reading a higher priority. It was a success, and after a couple adjustments to the system of how I do things, and an increase in the goal, I’ve now finished a second year in a similar fashion.

Apple’s Find My Friends (now combined with Find My iPhone as a single app called Find My), Snapchat’s location-sharing functionality, and other similar products all have one major issue: they are focused on sharing your exact location either all the time, or at least whenever you are using the app. This presents two problems in my mind.

I was recently talking with my friend and fellow web-dev, Ryan about music. He’s got a thing for drum and bass music, and I have a thing for brass-band jazz and its variants. He had come across a song that seemed to fit both of our interests.

Currently, in North America, our credit and debit cards have the ability to do “tap pay”, which is when you old the card up next to or against a receiver device (usually a hybrid that also handles chip and swipe payments) for a brief moment until a notification sounds, and your payment is processed. This is very convenient and finally makes going cashless simpler than handing over a twenty. (I do not wish to promote the idea of a cash-free ecosystem, but this sure is a solid step in that direction.) The simplicity and speed come at a cost, however: what happens if your card gets into the wrong hands?

Nota bene: While I wrote this over a year ago and some things have changed, the end result — and the three “winners” — remains the same. I still use all three on a regular basis.

For the longest time, my parents, siblings, wife, and I had a group conversation in iMessage, which helped bridge the hundreds of kilometers between us. It was great. We could arrange times for video calls, share 20 pictures of a random event, brag about how one’s weather was better than the other’s, and other similarly family-like things that are normal to talk about. It was great because it was a simple process to set up, a platform we were already using, and was decently secure for those of us who care about that sort of thing.

People break websites so easily. A very large portion of websites, especially for small businesses and organizations, are managed by people who don't have much experience with the technology or industry standards. Thanks to modern systems like Squarespace, it’s very easy to produce something that’s good enough for most people’s standards, but that also creates the possibility of breaking things.

If you can't hire a professional to build or maintain your website in a way that keeps it top-notch and better than your competition, here are some of the things to watch out for while working on your web presence.